BELIEFS; In Politics, the 'God Gap' Overshadows Other Differences

By PETER STEINFELS

Published: December 9, 2006

Why is there so much fascination with the so-called God gap, the finding that the more religiously observant Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Republican? Or, to put it the other way round, the more secular Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Democratic?

The question was raised Tuesday by Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow and public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, at a conference for journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Ms. Bowman was not questioning the reality of the God gap, which actually widened in the November elections. Although Democrats made gains among virtually every religious group and even cut into the Republican advantage among weekly worshipers, the gap still widened because Democrats made even greater gains among the less religiously active and affiliated.

But given the general continuity of religious trends, which Ms. Bowman also underlined, why has the God gap so thoroughly overshadowed the attention given to other persistent gaps in public life and voting patterns? She mentioned the generation gap, the gender gap, the education gap between people with or without college degrees, the income gap, the marriage gap, and, of course, the racial gap between whites and blacks.

By her way of calculating these gaps in the recent election, two of them (income and marriage) are comparable to the voting gap between weekly worshipers and less frequent ones, and one of them (race) is far greater.

There is enough thinking about these many divisions among voters that some political scientists have even begun to write about ''gapology.''

Plausible answers to Ms. Bowman's question are not hard to come by. Some may be obvious. But spelling them out sheds a little light on the public role of religion and a lot more light on the way that role is discussed.

Every gap, of course, has its 15 minutes of fame. The generation gap rode the wave of student antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s and '70s along with the lowering of the voting age to 18.

The gender gap followed on the crest of feminism and the growing entry of women into politics. Actually, as Ms. Bowman pointed out in an e-mail message, the gender gap ''was always a two-sided coin (Democrats were doing better with women, and Republicans with men), but most of the journalistic commentary -- at least to my recollection -- focused on the female side of the story.''

Controversy about claims by the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition to be the new arbiters of political power goes back to the 1980s. But as John Green, now a senior fellow at the Pew Forum in Washington, has pointed out, it wasn't until 1992 that a sustained gap in voting behavior between frequent and less frequent worshipers, regardless of religious background, became more politically significant than the familiar differences in voting among religious groups.

For people who wanted the nation to pay greater heed to the role of religion in public life, this God gap -- or more strictly, religious attendance gap -- was the smoking gun they had been waiting for. Conservative religious leaders, wanting to maximize their political influence, seized on the evidence that electoral success might depend on wooing more religiously observant voters.

But the ranks of those underscoring the God gap also included political scientists and sociologists who had been struggling for years to earn for religion the attention they felt it deserved as a political force alongside race, class and gender. In addition, consultants and ideologists quickly emerged, eager to advise Republicans and Democrats on how to exploit or counter the faith factor in campaigns.

Still, that is only half the story. The God gap also became the specter haunting a large segment of the chattering classes -- pundits, intellectuals, academics, liberal strategists -- who had bought into the belief that secularization was the inevitable wave of the future. Having long assumed that religion was quietly retiring to private life, if not to oblivion, they had been growing increasingly anxious about the emergence of religious faith as a political force.

That anxiety peaked with the demonstration of religion's lethal potential on 9/11 and with the demonstration in 2004 of the Bush administration's apparent dexterity in religion-based politics. One result has been the recent crop of books warning that theocracy was just around the corner in the United States.

In short, there was a convergence of opinion makers approaching the God gap from different directions. There were those encouraged about the public power of religion, those appalled by it, those trying to understand it, and those eager to manipulate it. Together, they propelled the God gap to its outsize status in the political imagination. They did not create the God gap. They inflated it.

The God gap is not, as far as anyone can detect, going away. It may narrow. It may widen. It will be affected by the issues and personalities that force themselves on the public for decisions. It will be affected by the contrary currents that define American culture -- its deep religiousness and its creeping secularity.

In November, though the God gap widened, it did not prove to be the engine of a Republican juggernaut.

Perhaps the God gap will now be recognized as important but not all-important, as only one of a number of gaps defining American political life, as something not to be ignored but also not to be overstated.